In the area of fibrous field emitters, special coatings are sometimes applied to a base conductive fiber to form an especially good emitter. These fibrous field emitters are then used in diode or triode structures for the purpose of extracting electrons in operation of a field emission device.
In the preparation of typical triode field emitter designs, an emitter tip has been initially fabricated upon a conductive layer and a gate layer is formed upon an insulating layer upon the conductive layer. Examples of such construction can be seen in U.S. Pat. No. 5,229,331 and U.S. Pat. No. 5,243,252. Conventionally, when a field emission device has incorporated a fibrous field emission element (cathode), a gate electrode has been fabricated as a separate structure. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,578,901 describes several embodiments including a fibrous cathode as a field emission element and a separate gate electrode spaced apart from the fibrous cathode.
It is an object of the present invention to combine the gate electrode with a field emission structure as a unified solitary structure.
It is a further object of the present invention to combine the gate electrode upon a fibrous field emitter into a field emission structure having a unified solitary structure.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a field emission structure having a unified solitary structure with a gate electrode layer and insulating layer directly upon a fibrous core substrate where the emitter structure has emission longitudinally along the length of the fiber structure.
Yet another object of the present invention is to provide a field emission structure having a unified solitary structure having separately controllable and addressable emitting regions.
Still another object of the present invention is to provide a fibrous field emission structure having a longitudinally sectioned gate electrode thereon whereby the fibrous field emission structure has separately controllable and addressable emitting sections.